Slaughterhouse-Five (29 page)

And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged
from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.

His stance was that of a punch-drunk fighter. His head was down. His fists were out front, waiting for information and battle plan. Derby raised his head, called Campbell a snake. He corrected that. He said that snakes couldn’t help being snakes, and that Campbell, who
could
help being what he was, was something much lower than a snake or a rat—or even a blood-filled tick.

Campbell smiled.

Derby spoke movingly of the American form of government, with freedom and justice and opportunities and fair play for all. He said there wasn’t a man there who wouldn’t gladly die for those ideals.

He spoke of the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people, and how those two nations were going to crush the disease of Nazism, which wanted to infect the whole world.

The air-raid sirens of Dresden howled mournfully.

The Americans and their guards and Campbell took shelter in an echoing meat locker which was hollowed in living rock under the slaughterhouse.
There was an iron staircase with iron doors at the top and bottom.

Down in the locker were a few cattle and sheep and pigs and horses hanging from iron hooks. So it goes. The locker had empty hooks for thousands more. It was naturally cool. There was no refrigeration. There was candlelight. The locker was whitewashed and smelled of carbolic acid. There were benches along a wall. The Americans went to these, brushing away flakes of whitewash before they sat down.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., remained standing, like the guards. He talked to the guards in excellent German. He had written many popular German plays and poems in his time, and had married a famous German actress named Resi North. She was dead now, had been killed while entertaining troops in the Crimea. So it goes.

Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Billy dozed in the meat locker. He found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale began.

“Father,” she said. “What are we going to
do
with you?” And so on. “You know who I could just kill?” she asked.

“
Who
could you kill?” said Billy.

“That Kilgore Trout.”

Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course. Billy had not only read dozens of books by Trout—he has also become Trout’s friend, to the extent that anyone can become a friend of Trout, who is a bitter man.

Trout lives in a rented basement in Ilium, about two miles from Billy’s nice white home. He himself has no idea how many novels he has written—possibly seventy-five of the things. Not one of them has made money. So Trout keeps body and soul together as a circulation man for the
Ilium Gazette
, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and flatters and cheats little kids.

Billy met him for the first time in 1964. Billy drove his Cadillac down a back alley in Ilium, and he found his way blocked by dozens of boys and their bicycles. A meeting was in progress. The boys were harangued by a man in a full beard. He was cowardly and dangerous, and obviously very good at
his job. Trout was sixty-two years old back then. He was telling the kids to get off their dead butts and get their daily customers to subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too. He said that whoever sold the most Sunday subscriptions during the next two months would get a free trip for himself and his parents to Martha’s fucking Vineyard for a week, all expenses paid.

And so on.

One of the newspaper boys was actually a newspaper
girl
. She was electrified.

Trout’s paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on the jackets of so many books. But, coming upon that face suddenly in a home-town alley, Billy could not guess why the face was familiar. Billy thought maybe he had known this cracked messiah in Dresden somewhere. Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war.

And then the newspaper girl held up her hand. “Mr. Trout—” she said, “if I win, can I take my sister, too?”

“Hell no,” said Kilgore Trout. “You think money grows on
trees
?”

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

So it goes.

Billy Pilgrim parked his Cadillac in the alley, and waited for the meeting to end. When the meeting broke up, there was still one boy Trout had to deal with. The boy wanted to quit because the work was so hard and the hours were so long and the pay was so small. Trout was concerned, because, if the boy really quit, Trout would have to deliver the boy’s route himself, until he could find another sucker.

“What are you?” Trout asked the boy scornfully. “Some kind of gutless wonder?”

This, too, was the title of a book by Trout,
The Gutless Wonder
. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread
use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.

It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.

Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Trout lost his argument with the boy who wanted to quit. He told the boy about all the millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys, and the boy replied: “Yeah—but I bet they quit after a week, it’s
such
a royal screwing.”

And the boy left his full newspaper bag at Trout’s feet, with the customer book on top. It was up to Trout to deliver these papers. He didn’t have a car. He didn’t even have a bicycle, and he was scared to death of dogs.

Somewhere a big dog barked.

As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his
shoulder, Billy Pilgrim approached him. “Mr. Trout—?”

“Yes?”

“Are—are you
Kilgore
Trout?”

“Yes.” Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his newspapers were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.

“The—the writer?” said Billy.

“The what?”

Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. “There’s a writer named Kilgore Trout.”

“There
is
?” Trout looked foolish and dazed.

“You never heard of him?”

Trout shook his head. “Nobody—nobody ever did.”

Billy helped Trout deliver his papers, driving him from house to house in the Cadillac. Billy was the responsible one, finding the houses, checking them off. Trout’s mind was blown. He had never met a fan before, and Billy was such an
avid
fan.

Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed, or on sale. “All these
years,” he said, “I’ve been opening the window and making love to the world.”

“You must surely have gotten letters,” said Billy. “I’ve felt like writing you letters many times.”

Trout held up a single finger. “One.”

“Was it
enthusiastic
?”

“It was
insane
. The writer said I should be President of the World.”